Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Not About the Debate

This is not about the vice-presidential candidates' debate. It is
a little rant about our political process, and the complicity of the
news media. In various forums of political discourse, it is
common for people to try to make an argument based upon the voting
record or a politician in Congress. "He votes for higher taxes 99
times," or "He didn't vote to support our troops," etc.

Certainly, it is a good idea to look at the voting record of a
candidate when trying to make an informed choice about voting.
What bugs me is that one has to be very careful drawing any sort of
conclusion about the candidate, based upon the kind of statements given
in the above examples. Ask the question: given that candidate X
voted for/against bill Y, what valid conclusions can be drawn?
First of all, the name of the bill often is misleading. Second,
most legislation contains a zillion provisions, many of which have
nothing to do with the main point of the bill. Third,
congresspersons trade votes all the time, for a variety of
reasons. Fourth, often legislation is introduced for the sole
purpose of allowing candidates to score political points by casting
certain votes, or to force the opposition into expressing an unpopular
position by casting a certain vote. Much of this legislation
never goes anywhere; it will pass the House, but not the Senate, or
vice versa. Fifth, almost always, congresspersons know how the
vote is going to turn out, well in advance of the actual vote. A
politician may very well cast a vote against a bill that he or she
supports, in order to make a point about some minor provision, knowing
full well that the legislation is going to pass anyway.

For these reasons, it is very difficult to know what conclusions can be
drawn for the single datum of how a politician voted on a particular
bill. In order to know how to interpret that data point, it is
necessary to understand the entire context of the vote. I would
hope that everyone would know this, but sometimes it seems that there
is a conspiracy of silence that prevents an adequate and thorough
discussion. Politicians collude with this, by not bringing it
up. News reporters and pundits collude with it, by echoing the
allegations about the meaning of certain votes, without given their
readers/viewers/listeners the entire context. And worst of all,
voters allow themselves to be influenced by this, without doing the
homework it takes to find out if the conclusions presented are, in
fact, valid.

So next time you hear that candidate A voted for/against legislation B
that did/would have done C, either do the homework, or better yet, just
ignore the comment as a bit of non-information.

The link below goes to a dummy account that automatically forwards email to the Federal Trade Commission's spam reporting service. Don't use it unless
you are a robot. Instead, act like a human and figure out the real address from this: joseph/dot/j7uy5/at-sign/gmail/dot/com

The Corpus Callosum is an occasional journal of armchair musings, by an Ann Arbor reality-based, slightly-left-of-center regular guy who reserves the right to be highly irregular at times.
Topics: social commentary, neuroscience, politics, science news.
Mission: to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy.